'What It Takes': A true political classic

One of the many bits of conventional wisdom about politicians is that they're all scoundrels in one way or another.

This is especially true of those who run for president.

Maybe they don't steal or lie or cheat on their spouse (although plenty do).

But other manifest flaws this species exhibits include huge egos, gargantuan self-importance and a God complex that requires frequent genuflection from the yes men and women who surround them.

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The political reporters I know share this view. I know I did, reinforced every four years as I hurtled around the country to greasy Main Street diners and toothpaste factories, trailing the men (and one woman) who wanted to be president.

There's truth to the adage that familiarity breeds contempt, and reporters who cover aspiring presidents — as I did — happily wallow in their contempt for the candidates.

It's the fallback conversation among political journalists when they gather in the bar at the Wayfarer Inn in Bedford for the (first in the nation!) New Hampshire presidential primary (or any other bar, for that matter).

But not reporter Richard Ben Cramer, the author of a truly groundbreaking book on American politics, "What It Takes," still fresh after more than 20 years.

Cramer took familiarity to an intense new level, parking himself in the kitchens and barnyards of the family and friends who knew the presidential candidates best.

He interviewed those people not once or twice but repeatedly, checking back with them again and again — sometimes 50 or 60 times — trying to understand where the candidates came from, who they were deep down, what they were made of and why they thought they should be president.

The result of that familiarity? Cramer wound up not with contempt but with genuine respect for the character and mettle of these flawed but extraordinary individuals who would give up so much (privacy, family life) to make the race.

"What It Takes" makes much of the political reporting that preceded it seem bland, one dimensional and, more than anything, inadequate.

I've been thinking a lot about Richard since he died last month of lung cancer at 62.

Here was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who, for me, shook the very pillars of political reporting.

He focused on the human rather than the usual journalistic menu: strategy, who's up, who's down, the snippets and scraps tossed off by the campaign advisers. (He called them "the white men" — women could be white men too — the generic staff that surrounds, insulates and too often kowtows to the candidate.)

Cramer's book on six men running for president in 1988 changed the way I thought about politicians and what it takes to really tell their stories.

Richard Cramer was a friend (not a close one) whose ability to watch, listen, cajole and charmingly wheedle information was a glory to watch from the day I first saw him in action.

By the time we met on the campaign trail in 1988, he was already two years into reporting on what he called "da book." But I had no idea until it came out — four years later, in 1992 — what he'd meant by research.

This book was a monster (in more ways than one): 1,047 pages (3.33 pounds, weighed on a digital scale). And the tiny print — well, get out your reading glasses — was daunting. Jampacked, it was.

The book devoured Cramer's bank account and his health. The half-million or so book advance didn't last long enough to fund all the travel ($5,000 for one day on Kitty Dukakis' plane; 300 days on the road one year).

As he told the Tribune on his book promo tour in '92, "I had every stress-related illness you can get. First, blood clots in my leg that had me hobbling. Then my back went out, my face froze up, my teeth fell out. What the hell else happened? Pleurisy in my lungs. I had to quit smoking (unfiltered Camels; he didn't stay quit) in the middle of it because I was going to smoke myself to death, at which point, of course I gained 40 pounds."

But what a book it was — and still is.

I just reread it, and like the first time two decades and five presidential elections ago, it was hard to put down. The stories, the detail.

With a pen in my hand I marked in the margins examples of great reporting (Mike Dukakis shaved five times a day), exhilarating writing. There was scarcely a page without red pen marks when I was done.

In Cramer's telling, George H.W. Bush throwing out the first ball at a baseball game becomes a cliffhanger, a story of intrigue and head-in-hands despair. All that from one pitch of a ball.

The reporters (me included) who covered Bob Dole through his long political career knew that his World War II wounds had left him with a useless right arm. Period. Paragraph.

Cramer's story of Dole's injury and what it took to recover is spellbinding, brimming with reporting and page-turning drama.

Dole's formidable mother, Bina ("She'd wax and shine the garbage cans") met him at the hospital after the Army shipped him back home to Kansas to die.

Cramer writes: "She had to pick eight cigarette butts out of his plaster cast. She told her sisters: They'd used her boy for an ashtray on the train."

After surviving an infection and a 108.7-degree fever, Dole was determined to get his arm back in shape, to play football again.

So his brother Kenny, Dad and friends, rigged up a rope pulley for Dole to work on that right arm:

"One afternoon, the family came home, and there was no Bob. … Finally they looked inside the garage, and there he was, hanging from the rafters by the bad right arm. Hanging with his feet swinging off the floor. Soaked and trembling with sweat and pain. Bina burst into tears right there. Thought he was dead. But his will was alive: Bob wouldn't come down. If he could straighten out that arm, he was going to play ball again."

At the outset of the book, Cramer explains the questions he was trying to answer about the presidential contenders:

"What in their backgrounds could give them that huge ambition, that kind of motor, that will and discipline, that faith in themselves? What kind of faith would cause, say a dozen of these habitual winners to bend their lives and the lives of those dear to them to one hugely public roll of the dice in which all but one would fail?"

For Bob Dole, Cramer found the answer in the rafters of that garage in Russell, Kan.

I spent 15 years as a reporter in the nation's capital for three different newspapers, writing tens of thousands of words about government policy, politics, politicians.

Cramer on Washington: "About this preoccupation there can be no dispute: knowledge is power, and the capital is a city built on power which means knowing and being known. ... But this is more than a business in Washington. It is life.'"

Cramer had plenty to say (none good) about the gotcha reporters, the "Karacter Kops" who instead of trying to understand the people they cover, are simply on the lookout for scandal. Joe Biden plagiarized the speech of a British politician. Gary Hart had a woman problem.

When Miami Herald reporters, following a tip, caught Hart with a woman not his wife in his home in D.C.:

"It was like God Himself had thrust this juicy pork chop into their mouths! ... Hart was in there, in his house with this, this … this cutlet! From MIAMI! … She was young, she was blond … she was … Who was she?" (She was Donna Rice.)

"It was feral. It was without thought. Hart was catching the dread and fatal affliction — he was ridiculous. Even callow wannabe-big-feet (reporters) could smell blood on the forest floor. Someone was gonna … take Hart down.Why not them?"

A few days later Hart dropped out of the race.

Cramer took heat for the size of his book ("What It Weighs"), the three-dot style, exclamation points and italics reminiscent of Tom Wolfe. But that's what made it … so readable!!

Critics also nailed him for lack of attribution of the stories and quotes — even though Cramer had obsessively checked their accuracy from every angle imaginable and explained his reporting techniques in a lengthy author's note.

Most of all, the Washington pundits were affronted that the book had no index. They couldn't go to the back, look for their names and read only the parts that pertained to them — and then put the book back on the bookstore shelf.

Like everything else about "What It Takes," Cramer agonized about whether there should be an index. But he decided against it because he wanted the D.C. players and know-it-alls to read the whole thing.

If you want to understand the race for the White House, what it takes to run for president — and the toll it takes — you can't do better than to read the whole thing too.

Ellen Warren is a Tribune senior correspondent who has covered seven presidential campaigns.

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